Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
We Turn Our Thoughts
We turn our thoughts to yesterday…to a world that lives only in our memory.
As we recall the days gone by, we know the past is irretrievable.
Yet—through the gift of memory, we recapture treasured…
Reform Synagogue, Plauen
This modern synagogue in Plauen (in the Saxony region) was one of the few synagogues built in Germany in the economically turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Jews and non-Jews contributed funds…
Untitled, New Yorker, February 3, 1945
By 1945, when this cartoon was published in The New Yorker, Saul Steinberg had already established the unconventional style of cartooning for which he became famous. His cartoons expressed humor…
The Strabismic Jew
The Strabismic Jew is one of Baskin's most famous prints. “Strabismic” means “squinting” and, indeed, the Yiddish inscription reads “The Jew with the squinty eyes.” In this enigmatic woodcut, the face…
The Treasure
Yakhne-Brayne [Reading slowly and with difficulty so that the words run together in a monotone.]:“And God caused the Temple to be destroyed and said, ‘I will remember your sins and you will devour…
Outlines of Jewish History
Co-incident with the founding of relief associations was the establishment of the Jewish orders, among which the first was the B’ne B’rith, chiefly for…
Portrait of Wakara
Solomon Nunes Carvalho painted this portrait of Wakara (ca. 1808–1855) of the Timpanogos tribe (later chief of the Utah Indians) after returning from a trip to the territories of Kansas, Colorado, and…
Heinrich Heine
[ . . . ] The Judaism into which Heine was born and with which he had to come to terms as a maturing man was the Judaism of the German reform. This was, to be sure, no longer the reform, creative in…
Founding Program
The purpose of Agudat Israel is the solution of the respective tasks facing the Jewish collectivity, in the spirit of the Torah. In accordance with this purpose, it sets itself the following goals: (1…
The Columbus Platform
In view of the changes that have taken place in the modern world and the consequent need of stating anew the teachings of Reform Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis makes the following…
Lamentations
In a dingy kitchen
Facing a Ghetto backyard
An old woman is chanting Jeremiah’s Lamentations,
Quaveringly,
Out of a Hebrew Bible.
The gaslight flares and falls . . .
This night,
Two thousand…
A Bintel Brief
Dear Editor,I am a Russian revolutionist and a freethinker. Here in America I became acquainted with a girl who is also a freethinker. We decided to marry, but the problem is that she has Orthodox…